Feb. 06, 2015

Remembering ‘The Father of the Pill’

The chemist Carl Djerassi, often known as “the father of the pill,” passed away on January 30, 2015, at the age of 91. He came to the United States at 16, an Austrian Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe. He later went on to do research foundational to the development of the birth control pill—for which he received the National Medal of Science. At age 75, he became a full-time writer, penning dozens of books and plays. We remember him here with a clip from an interview we recorded with him on February 13, 2004, at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.